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The End of the Etan Patz Case?

In the world of the Etan Patz case—which is the world of New York, of frenzies, and of children and bad urban dreams—it made sense, when news came on Thursday morning that a man had admitted killing him, to wonder if the new suspect might simply be mad. It is the sort of crime that a crazy person might falsely claim. On May 25, 1979—thirty-three years ago today—Etan, a first-grader in SoHo, had walked to school and vanished; he wasn’t ever found. His disappearance unsettled a city full of people who, on every lamppost, saw the picture of a small, smiling boy, and couldn’t forget him. (I’ve written about how, as a little girl, I was one of them.) That sort of attention could be deranging. So skepticism was prudent, but it was also a habit: this was the case, for many New Yorkers, that was never going to be solved.

By the end of the day, though, Commissioner Ray Kelly came out to say that Pedro Hernandez was under arrest: “We believe that this is the individual responsible.” Hernandez lived in Maple Shade, New Jersey, was fifty-one—and so eighteen in 1979—married, and, according to Kelly, “remorseful.” The police still didn’t have any physical evidence, but they had a three-and-a-half-hour interview on videotape, and a handwritten, signed confession, in which Hernandez said he had done terrible things. Kelly said that he seemed relieved. Does anyone else feel that way?

This was a sharp turn, and not the first. It was only last month that the name of the longtime prime suspect, Jose Ramos, was replaced by that of a neighborhood handyman, Othniel Miller, when the police dug up Miller’s workshop basement. They didn’t find anything, but someone in New Jersey who had heard a story from Hernandez read about the search, saw a connection, and made a phone call. The impulse was typical of this story, and part of its power: you heard about Etan, and saw reflections in your own life—stayed away from a stranger, kept an eye on a child. This time, maybe, that instinct has yielded an answer.

In the hours after the first, terse, announcement that someone was in custody, though, there were multiple accounts that didn’t quite align—and in this way, too, the latest news reprised the rhythms of the case. For most of the day, the Post’s headline on its homepage was GRISLY NEW DETAILS—which was only odd in that, for so long, there hadn’t been any details at all, only an absence and haunting speculation. The AP, Times, Daily News, and Post, had Patz, respectively, suffocated, strangled, strangled and stabbed, stabbed and dismembered. “He lured the boy with candy, stabbed him, cut up his remains and put them in plastic bags”at the “neighborhood bodega” where Hernandez worked. (The AP described it, dubiously, as a “convenience store.”)

Kelly said this: “He has confessed to choking Etan in the basement of a bodega.” Wednesday night, Hernandez went back to the scene with the police, and, Kelly said, “described to the detectives how he lured young Etan from the school bus stop at West Broadway and Prince Street with the promise of a soda.”

The Times, early in the day, had cited a police official who described Hernandez confessing that he had wrapped Etan in bags and put him in a box, and “left the box at a location in Manhattan, but when he returned several days later the box was no longer there.” Kelly, with more brutal specificity, said that Hernandez claimed to have “disposed of the body by putting it into a plastic bag and placing it in the trash.” Things are carried away from the city streets all the time, and then are gone, and no one even expects to find them. But that’s not true of a boy.

For those just coming to the case, and even those who have followed it for decades, the glimpses of what is permanent and what is disposable can come as a shock. Almost every story about it includes a paragraph on how SoHo has been transformed (boutiques rather than bodegas, tourists rather than handymen). Kelly mentioned that the presumed scene of the crime was now an eyeglasses shop. But Etan’s parents never moved, and kept the same phone number, just in case. Meanwhile, their passion about finding their son did, for whatever comfort it might give them, change the way missing-child cases were handled—the way, too, that children thought of themselves and adults who might hurt them. There is only so much a child, or a parent, can do; there is still tragedy, and luck. It helped, though.

Then there was Etan’s picture: forever young, like a shaggy-haired boy king, counterposed with all of the ideas of what could have happened to his body—maybe entombed in a box, maybe wrapped in plastic bag, but still, thirty-three years later, lost. Solving the case would alter it fundamentally; there might be a trial, and something like justice. But it’s not a cheerful triumph when a little boy is still dead.

“I caution you all that there’s a lot more investigating to do,” Mayor Bloomberg said on Thursday afternoon. He was at Coney Island, for the opening of some new rides. He might have said that there is a lot more dreaming to do, even if it is now about what might have been, rather than what might still be. It’s safe to say that anyone who has followed this case has, at one point or another, drifted off into imagining Etan kidnapped but still alive, maybe no longer remembering his real name or his birthday or realizing that, this October, he would be forty years old. If Hernandez’s story is borne out, the thousand narratives of what might have happened will resolve into a single sad ending. One will have to go back to that place in one’s memories where a last hope was stored, and find that it is gone.